Advances in digital recognition technologies

The automatic analysis of images for security systems depends on two key system aspects. Firstly, sensing technology and secondly, the processing technology that follows it. This paper is an introduction to some of the advances in recognition systems processing which have recently led to more sophisticated, reliable and powerful systems being deployed in operational use. Examples of such systems include: automatic fingerprint recognition, automatic number plate recognition, shipping container code recognition, signature verification and complex data mining. Up until recently, systems that relied heavily on the processing technology for their specificity tended to be unreliable, due to the inability of some of the traditional approaches to handle the variations found in the real world and the large amount of computation required to handle complex scene or data analysis. Such variation arises nor only from the subject of the recognition but also from environmental factors, such as weather and so forth.